How To: Fight Henchmen

It’s punny business

It’s not enough to just kill or maim these henchmen; you must have a cache of hilarious puns in the bank to spit out as you stand over their twitching, bloody corpses. Most often, you will be saying these only to yourself, but that doesn’t mean you can skimp on quality.

As you scan the room for objects to use as weapons, pick only those that you can formulate a pun around. If your opponent is coming at you with a sword, grab the closest pen and use it to kill him. Because, as we all know, “the pen is mightier than the sword!” Fighting in a slaughterhouse? Don’t ignore those meat hooks hanging everywhere. Dispatch your foe onto one of them and let no one in particular know that “he got the hook!” Now you’re getting it! Sure, this limits your choices and puts a lot of pressure on you, but these are the sacrifices you must make. Don’t ask why.

Use your environment

You will most likely find yourself duking it out in a series of abandoned warehouses and dark alleys. Use these settings to your advantage, whether that involves swinging on the ductwork, smashing your enemy into random crates and boxes, or slamming his head into a fire escape over and over.

Your final showdown will most likely be in some sort of steam factory. This means lots of potentially deadly machinery, random fire-spewing valves and readily available blunt objects. Ignore them and attack with your bare hands instead.

Work your way through the henchmen in ascending order

Every big crime syndicate has a stringent hierarchy. To do this right, you have to start at the bottom and kill your way up. It should be fairly obvious who fits in where in this pecking order. The guys with the least lines and the greasiest hair usually live at the bottom, while the rich old man is usually the boss.

Save your most elaborate and violent plan for the boss. You aren’t just righting some raw injustice, you are also entertaining people. Of course, you are going to take your lumps in this finale. This last enemy will beat you within an inch of your life, but don’t lose hope. He will likely stop punishing you just long enough to mock you. Use this opportunity to swing momentum back in your favor. This is best accomplished by miraculously and instantly recovering from your injuries and attacking your foe with the shard of glass or the heavy metal pipe or that live electrical wire that just happens to be lying nearby.

Be persistent

When you eventually meet up with the head henchman and battle it out, make sure you kill him real good. Chances are you will have to do so a few times, as these cretins have a remarkable ability to withstand some pretty hardcore stuff and keep coming back for more. Don’t fall for this possum routine — and for the love of God, make sure you see his dead, dismembered body before you grab your gal and celebrate with a passionate kiss.

fight the good fight

Pop quiz, hot shot: You’re out of bullets and find yourself staring down the barrel of your nemesis’ shotgun. What do you do? In real life, you probably curl up in a sobbing heap and try begging. But in the wonderful world of action movies, you unravel a firehose, loop it over the wood beam above you and swing over, Tarzan-style, to kick the gun out of his hands. Because if we learned anything from all these action flicks, it’s that there is always a happy ending.